The foundling house of Mexico City, 1774: a rulebook that describes the blanket a child arrived in
Mexico City's Casa de Niños Expósitos was given printed constitutions in 1774, approved by the king and published the next year. They order the chaplain to write down the day a child was left, the clothes it came wrapped in with their colours, any mark on its body and any paper found with it, copied word for word; they fix what wet nurses were paid and how the children were inspected; and they keep the house responsible for a child until it could earn a living.
Why this wins its question: Ask what became of abandoned children in colonial Spanish America and the answer arrives as a sentence about church charity, sourced to a modern survey. This is the institution's own printed constitutions of 1774, opened page by page: the clause ordering a child's swaddling clothes recorded by quality and colour and any paper found with it copied word for word, the four pesos a month for a wet nurse with whole milk and three for half, the monthly pay-day at which every nurse had to produce the child to be looked at, the written contract binding a master to teach a boy a trade, and the free burial of infants at the parish's cost. Because the method here is accumulation rather than selection, the same pages carry what a favourable account would leave out: two separate registers, one for Spaniards and one for "Niños de Indios, y mas castas"; a standing endowment drawn from the estates of the expelled Jesuits; a rule suspending the married life of the resident nurses; and an elaborate machinery for marking deaths in a book that never prints a number.
Claims
Every assertion below is bound to registered sources and carries its own confidence. Weight them; do not treat the page as uniformly authoritative.
The house existed before it had rules, and the archbishop who wrote the rules says who paid for it until then. His preamble records that his "dignísimo Predecesor" in the see of Mexico, moved by the need that so populous a capital had of such an establishment, ordered that all the children left there be taken in, and that they "se han mantenido hasta la presente á costa de la Sagrada Mitra, y de algunas piadosas limosnas"; he writes the constitutions because the numbers of children and the costs were rising every day.
The approval chain is printed in the volume and can be dated exactly. A royal cédula of 19 July 1774 approved the constitutions formed by the archbishop Alonso Núñez de Haro y Peralta for the government of the Real Casa de Niños Expósitos of the capital; the viceroy Antonio María Bucareli y Ursúa put his cúmplase to it in Mexico on 31 October 1774 and returned it to the archbishop so that he might arrange its printing; the secretariat noted the cédula entered in the books of the office of government and war on 8 November 1774. The book was printed in Mexico by Joseph de Jáuregui in 1775.
The endowment came out of a confiscation, and the first constitution says so in its opening sentence. The first standing income the house was given had been assigned to it by the Real Junta Superior de Temporalidades, established to handle all the causes and business belonging to "los Regulares Expulsos" — the expelled Jesuits — and drawn from various pious foundations whose patronages had fallen to the crown. Because of that the patronage of the house belonged to the crown, the royal arms were to be fixed on its front, and the viceroy as vice-patron chose the chaplain from three names put up by the congregation. The foundling house of Mexico City was endowed with the property of a religious order the same crown had driven out.
The reception rule is the most striking thing in the book, because it is designed to keep a child identifiable. Constitution VII orders that as soon as a child is brought, the porter take it, show it to the chaplain and carry it to the children's room; that the chaplain, in the presence of the ama mayor, write the entry beginning with the day, month and year on which the child was left; then the age it appears to be in her judgement; then "con toda puntualidad las embolturas ... expresando su calidad, y colores", the wrappings the child was left in, as and how they were; then the most notable marks it has on it; and that any paper found with the child be copied into the entry "á la letra".
Siblings were to be linked in the register as well. If the person bringing the child assured the house that it was the brother or sister of one already received, the fact was to be noted both in the new entry and in the entry of the child said to be its sibling. The record was built so that a family could be reconstructed from it later, which is the practical point of writing down a blanket's colour.
The same constitution divides the children by race in the same breath, and the wording is not ambiguous. For these entries there were to be two books, "el uno para asentar las Partidas de Españoles, y el otro para las de los Niños de Indios, y mas castas". A house that recorded a foundling's swaddling clothes so carefully also sorted foundlings into two registers before anyone could know whose child it was.
Baptism was handled on the assumption that most arrivals were unbaptised and that some would die within hours. Constitution VIII orders every child baptised conditionally even if it came with a note claiming baptism, unless the note was signed by a parish priest or by a known person; that if the ama mayor saw a child arrive sick and feared it would live little, she take it to the chaplain at once; and that if it seemed to her so near its end that there was no time even to carry it to him, "la misma Ama mayor le baptizará por sí, para lo qual deberá estar instruida en la forma, y modo de baptizar". Healthy children were taken to the parish of the Sagrario the next day or sooner.
The woman in charge was defined by rule. Constitution XI requires the ama mayor to be a woman of standing, a widow, who has borne children herself; she lives in the children's room, may keep no son of her own with her, and answers by inventory for all the linen and equipment there; she appoints and replaces the two resident wet nurses; and her first duty on every arrival is to examine the child carefully for sickness that would make baptism urgent.
The resident nurses were paid and housed on stated terms, and one of the terms fell on their own marriages. Constitution XII orders two wet nurses always in the children's room, chosen and changed by the ama mayor, young, notably robust, with good milk and of peaceable temper, lodged inside the room; they wash their own and the children's clothes; the ama mayor is to take care "que estas dos Amas no comercien con sus Maridos mientras estuvieren"; the salary is four pesos a month with food, and each is to have a separate bed with linen of the house. The rule that protected the milk supply also suspended a married woman's marriage while she worked.
Most infants were reared outside the house, and the outside nurses were vetted and inspected. Constitution XIII requires them to be of good repute and habits, healthy, with good milk, "y no la dén á medias, ni dén á mamar calostros", resident in the city or in nearby places; where a nurse lived outside Mexico the chaplain and the ama mayor were to give her no child unless she brought a certificate of good standing from the parish priest of her place. Wages were four pesos a month for whole milk and three for half. At the monthly pay-day in the chaplain's office all nurses had to bring the children with them "para que los vean si están bien cuidados, y alimentados", and any child that seemed not to be was given a different nurse.
Children in the house were fed on a written schedule. The ama mayor was to feed the girls of the workroom and the other girls in the room, handing over daily the ration assigned to each and dividing it into breakfast, dinner and a hot supper, with dinner served as soon as the clock struck twelve and supper as soon as it struck eight, and a little bread in the afternoon for the girls on the establishment.
The house's responsibility did not end at weaning. Constitution XXII holds that while the boys and girls, "Hijos de esta Casa", cannot earn their own living, and until the girls take a settled state, they remain under the protection and care of the house and the direction of the chaplain; they are to be taken back in and fed on the same ration as the children of the establishment whenever they lose the place they were put in, or are left unprovided by the death of the people rearing them, or by those people falling into poverty, "ó quando entendiere el Capellan, que en las Casas que los crian los enseñan malas costumbres". The chaplain's principal care for the boys was that they learn "Oficio decente, con que puedan ganar que comer", the house paying the master an allowance or clothing the boy on entry if that was needed, and the master binding himself by written contract to have taught him within a fixed time.
Adult transitions were provided for in the same style. The surviving passage of Constitution XXVII records that where a girl of the house professed as a nun a receipt was taken from the prelada; that to the males of the house who wished to marry the chaplain gave only the certificates needed; and that if one of them wished to enter religion and had not the cost of entry, the chaplain was to have him present a memorial to the congregation.
The rules for the dead say more about the death rate than any figure in the book, and no figure is given. Constitution XXVIII orders children who die in the house shrouded in cloth of little value and carried to the parish church; those under seven buried with the office recited, those over seven with vigil and sung mass; children over two who died while being reared outside buried by the parish priest of the place where they were, with the entry made in the burial book, "sin llevar por el rompimiento, ni por el Entierro derechos algunos"; and the chaplain, on learning that a child had died, was to mark a cross in the margin of its reception entry and in every other place where its name was written. A house that had to legislate free burials for infants at two ages was burying a great many of them.
What this evidence is, and what it is not, should be said plainly. This is a rulebook approved by the crown and printed by the archbishop: first-hand evidence of what was ordered in 1774 and of the dates on which it was approved, entered and published. It is not evidence of practice. The volume prints no admission counts, no mortality, no wage accounts and no inspection results, and nothing here should be read as showing that the children were in fact fed at twelve and eight, that the nurses were in fact inspected, or that the trades were in fact taught.